AFTER LIFE, DEATH.

a lot of kids grew up reading the comic books about the umbrella academy. bruce knew, even vaguely, the children of other wealthy scions of gotham society that loved them. number one. number three. he hadn’t read them. he knew one thing about reginald hargreeves, which is the one time alfred, when he was eleven or twelve, saw the man’s face plastered on the front page of the newspaper. there was something in alfred’s expression, a twist or a sharpness that bruce could not interpret, and something like contempt.

alfred didn’t show emotion like that often. still doesn’t. he is always carefully measured and gracious when it comes to other people, except when he chooses not to be.

that stuck with bruce. something terrible was there.

and now, after reading vanya’s book, after talking to her, after quietly researching each and every hargreeves sibling he can find? bruce doesn’t think alfred was wrong. he and vanya haven’t truly talked about it yet. it feels like it might lead down paths that neither of them are fully ready to consider. but there’s still reasons to want to disappear for both of them. different but the same. _i don’t want to be who i am. i don’t want to be this person._

( the truth is that sometimes i get tired. there is no such thing as a night off, not with this. even the light can only deter the criminal element so much. if i don’t make an appearance, then they decide it’s safe. maybe i retired or stepped away or, as some of them fervently wish, died. the opposite of fear is bravery.

but then i remember that every day i’m tired, every day i falter, is a day it all happens again. not to me, but to someone else. )

bruce shrugs. “it’s easy when you’re gotham’s most infamous shut-in. no one would… ever assume that it’d be me out there. in the suit.” he can barely look at people outside of it. smiling is almost an impossibility, a tiny twitch of his mouth that feels too vulnerable. there’s that same flicker, though, when vanya gestures at herself. yeah. he’s seen her as the white violin, all the color leeched from her outfit, illuminated from within.

“i do, yeah.” because he can’t actually stop a bullet. but the suit can, in the dark. “part of it is… protecting myself, though. you just have a different skillset.”

is it good, to compliment someone on this? maybe. maybe not.

bruce watches vanya for a moment. quiet. “something else,” he echoes quietly. “i think i’ve been trying for that my whole life. when i was a teenager, i used to… well. i used to hide my face and go out street racing. it was stupid. almost got killed a few times.” almost chose to not avoid the crash. almost didn’t care if he did die. he pared it down to the mildest version of that, though. he knows that’s better. “won a lot of races, though. helped that i didn’t talk much to anyone.”

nobody would ever assume bruce wayne was inside the batman’s suit. in a way, the reverse is true for vanya: no one would ever assume the white violin could dwell within her frame. a wolf in sheep’s clothing, maybe. no — more a sheep that ripped out the wolf’s teeth, learned to weaponize them for herself. unassuming, but dangerous.

the dissonance is inside her, too. when she’s like this — no persona, no performance, no glaring-bright light coming out of her — she feels so distant from the version of her that is dangerous. even knowing it all lies barely beneath the surface, it sometimes feels just as buried as it was for those first twenty-nine years, until some piercing alarm clock three buildings down or the scream of ambulance sirens brings the power bubbling up again.

she wonders, sometimes, if her siblings felt that same disconnect, if number four and the seance and klaus were all separate people to her brother, cordoned off and compartmentalized in neat drawers. if bruce feels that way about batman. does their shapeshifting only go skin-deep, or is it further than that, something wrenching itself free in their chests and shouting to be known?

it isn’t the sort of thing she can ask. or maybe she could, and is just too cowardly to, when she’s vanya and not the white violin.

“ street racing? ” she looks at him for a moment, then nods, as if she’s decided something. “ that makes sense about you, actually. i can see it. ”

she’s pretty sure diego did something similar as a teenager, though she doesn’t know if he’d actually won any races. from what she remembers of their conversations back then, the few times they’d talked in between him moving out of the academy and her publishing her book, it wasn’t really about winning, anyways. it was the danger, the recklessness; the same reason diego’d made himself a sort of vigilante far before she did, and, if she allows herself to have the cautious confidence that is only possible with the distance she has from herself, why diego was never as effective at it as she is. more focused on the adrenaline than the outcome.

“ the most i ever did was sneak out and wander around at night. only slightly less dangerous, but definitely less fun, i’d guess. ” there was never all that much to do, aside from the occasional trip to the twenty-four hour diner a couple blocks from the academy, where she would sit and watch the people walking past out the neon-lit windows until near-sunrise, but in retrospect, even that was foolishly risky. gotham’s no place for a teenage girl after dark, especially not one as sheltered as she had been.

maybe that’s what it was about. proving she could take the risk. she thinks, mostly, it was just naivety.

his ears are still ringing.

the guy fired the shotgun a few feet away from him. people don’t realize how loud a shotgun is. there’s a reason that you wear protection in shooting ranges. the impact right against the middle of his spine made him almost stagger forward a step or two before he spun on the spot to face the three guys spilling in through the door. confusion. terror. all aimed at him as they scrambled for their weapons.

bruce’s first thought wasn’t for him. it was to get in the way of gunfire. he can always take the bullets. he can always take the hits. she doesn’t have the benefit of all his kevlar.

he couldn’t hear her behind him. not well. did the only thing he could and surged forward, getting there first, hitting harder. he’s seen selina fight. he knows where she thrives in, which isn’t direct conflict. one-on-one, or weaving in and out of the fight. this isn’t her with a gun — it’s both of them with their limbs and what weight they can throw behind them. another shot pinged off of his shoulder. he’s used to the feeling of a pistol by now. it barely registers. he’ll only notice the bruises tomorrow morning, looking in the mirror and counting which ones are new and which ones are healing.

the fight melted into movement, into action and reaction. at some point his hands folded around the barrel of a gun and the stock slammed into the guy’s skull, again and again. he knows how hard to push. not enough to kill, but enough to send the man sprawling across the floor.

it ended like this, bruce crouched over a man on the ground, hitting him again and again. the man’s nose is a mess of blood. his cheekbone is shattered. one eye is swelling up. he isn’t even making noise any more, head lolling to one side, chest heaving.

the sound came back in at some point. he wasn’t sure when, but now it’s almost clear.

selina’s voice cuts through the haze.

@afterpale : babe, you’re a cold-blooded slaughter. ( selina @ bruce )

bruce closes his eyes for a minute. lets the weight settle as he brings one leg over the man’s torso.

he can’t think about that. can’t think about how this is the easiest part for him, the thing he lapses into when the rest of his mind empties.

his breath steadies. “you’re alright?” because that’s what matters.

it has to be the only thing that matters.

it takes him a moment to realize his hands are still clenched into fists. they loosen slowly with the creak of leather, a deliberate motion that almost hurts too.

the thing about these kinds of fights is they’re over almost as soon as they begin. a guy carrying this kinda artillery into a room usually doesn’t know how to deal with someone running at him full-speed and bulletproof, and by the time they get over the shock of that, batman’s already got them pinned and bloodied. it’s a matter of minutes, if that.

they fight together like a choreographed dance, at this point; the second she hears the sharp crack of a gun, way before the ringing in her ears has a chance to begin to fade, she knows he’ll be taking the lead. she sees him almost tip forward with the strike of a bullet and for a moment she thinks it’s hit flesh through some crack in his armor, and for a moment she thinks she may scream —

but it’s fine. he’s leaping into motion before the impulse can reach her vocal chords. she runs at the same time, to the side instead of towards; she doesn’t have the kind of invulnerability to go hand-to-hand with a shotgun, but once they’re disarmed she can knock ‘em down if he doesn’t beat her to it. teamwork, and all that.

it’s over quick, but batman’s still going, on the ground over a man with a steady drip of blood soaking into the floor. she crouches down next to him slow and does not look at the man under him. that asshole doesn’t matter.

what matters is there’s a little bit of blood splatter on batman’s face where the mask doesn’t cover, and she reaches out to wipe at it with her fingertips, careful to avoid the claws of her gloves. it’s a kind of gentleness not suited to the bullets scattered across the room and the unconscious men with their now-empty guns thrown out of arms reach, but the contrast feels necessary. like an ice-cold drink of water on a humid summer day.

is she alright? “ always, “ she says, easy, without even thinking about it — worst she got was ringing ears and a couple bruises. nothing she can’t handle.

@afterpale​ : i used to imagine that in the darkness, i could change shape. ( vanya @ bruce )

“so did i,” he says.

even before what happened. even before his parents died. it was a game before then, because he liked monsters and goosebumps books and he lived in a place that he might even call haunted. wayne manor was ancient before it became the orphanage, and then it crumbled further and further until the fire turned it into ash.

after they died, he used to imagine he could change into someone that could do something in that moment. maybe he never stopped.

( gotham project. day 0. the presupposition is that criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. if i can make fear my tool, then i can be everywhere at once. it won’t matter that i’m one person. they won’t know where i am. i am no longer a human being. i am anything but bruce wayne, gotham’s orphaned prince. )

the fact is that it’s easier to be the batman than to be bruce wayne. he has no natural business acumen. his father mainly became a businessperson through a series of small decisions that snowballed; after all, he was a surgeon first.

does that make bruce a vigilante first, now? maybe. he’s always been detached from the heights of gotham. outside of the suit he’s barely a person. he drifts through wayne tower like a ghost. anywhere can be haunted, even in the middle of gotham. it doesn’t even have to be old. it just has to be home to a person who isn’t a person.

he stares out of the window. out at the city. it’s getting dark now, enough where he folded up the sunglasses and slipped them back into his pocket. below, the element is beginning to stir from its daily slumber. they will slip out onto the streets under the cover of night, illuminated by sodium streetlight, yellow and infected.

they will make prey of people. of innocent people.

“it’s easier,” bruce says. “to imagine yourself in the dark, i mean. you can be anyone. you can be no one, if you need to be. or if you have to be. you can walk out as someone else.”

close your eyes and disappear inside yourself. isn’t that what he’s always doing? isn’t that what he’s already done?

the bulletproofing is to keep him from getting hurt. yes. it’s also because if he absorbs a full blast of shotgun pellets to the chest and gets up, and keeps going, then he is no longer human. not to them. not to himself.

( i will become a terror. i will become a bat. )

when vanya was small — before she was vanya, still nameless little number seven — she would sneak out of bed in the middle of the night and walk, silent on tip-toes, through the academy’s halls. in retrospect, she knows that her father probably knew she was breaking the rules. cameras lurked everywhere, and even with only the moonlight through curtained windows to light her path, there’s no way she’d gone unnoticed every time; she simply was deemed too unimportant to stop.

at the time, though, it had been her secret. in the darkness, without her family around to tell her how ordinary she was, with nobody to hear her voice, she could imagine she had number three’s powers, whispering rumors to herself ( though she barely spoke, at this point in her life; easier to do so with nobody around to hear or ignore her. ) without ever picking up a knife ( because what if she cut herself, left behind evidence of her rulebreaking? ) she could pretend that she could curve one in mid-air, throwing perfectly to her targets. in the pitch-black, who’s to say she couldn’t see any ghosts lurking in the halls?

if she wanted to be truly special, not just copycatting her siblings’ abilities, she had imagined wrapping the darkness around her like a warm blanket and fading into it. invisibility suited her, she had thought. she felt half-invisible on the best of days, anyways; perhaps she was, and the mere fact of the ability had prevented her father from noticing she had it?

[ excerpt from extra-ordinary: my life as number seven — even then, no older than seven or eight, i knew it was nothing more than make-believe. i knew that my father was smart enough that he would not have simply overlooked my supposed powers. i knew that if i was truly invisible, there were plenty of things i would have used the ability to hide from, moments when i would have vanished in full view of everybody.

still, it was enough to briefly believe i could be special, too, where nobody could see me and mock my foolishness. i could dance around the halls invisibly, so long as i made no sound and was back in bed by morning. i could be someone other than number seven. ]

“ you’ve managed it better than i have, i think. changing shape in the dark. ” there is a reason it had taken her so long to connect the man to the bat: he shapeshifts well, and nobody not given as many clues as she’d had would recognize bruce wayne in the batman. she’d counted on the same being true for herself and the white violin, but —

“ i mean, when i was a kid, i thought i could actually be invisible at night, but — when i’m all ... ” she motions awkwardly, something halfway resembling lazy jazz-hands. “ glow-y, it’s a little more difficult. ” she shrugs, smiles a little, looking out at the city and at her reflection in the glass. a light goes on in a window a few blocks down, right where the mirror-image of her eyes are. “ you camouflage better. ”

@afterpale : i would have broken everything. i would have killed anybody to have you back here with me. 

“i don’t want that,” says eve, shoving clumps of bloody gauze into the too small trash can. “you almost died. do you realize that?”

she can’t help it. she should be angry. furious. outraged, even. the way that dasha wanted her to be furious with villanelle when she stabbed nico with that pitchfork and tried to make it look like it was villanelle’s work. but her tone can’t quite get there, not with this. at most she’s hitting exasperation. looking at villanelle feels like someone’s hitting her in the sternum, like she was taught how to relatively recently. it pushes the breath out of her and when she pulls it back in, all she can manage is this. a weak protest.

it doesn’t even feel real. it feels like lip service. it’s the tone she might have used when placating nico about how far she was willing to go to catch this assassin.

eve closes her hands into fists. tight. so, so tight. she can feel the edges of her nails digging into her palms. “isn’t the whole thing that you were changing? no more killing? emerging from some chrysalis like some… some good bible-thumping butterfly? i mean, clearly that’s not true. look at yourself.” she throws out a hand towards villanelle’s outfit, bright and obnoxiously patterned. it’s a little bloody along the spine still, and it’s definitely not the outfit of some good christian girl. 

they’re separated just slightly by the barrier of the bathroom door. villanelle is sprawled out on the bed, halfway tilted onto her side in order to peer at her. 

eve stares harder at the trash can. her hands are red. like when she stabbed villanelle for the first time in that paris apartment. the first time they ever really saw each other, exactly as they were. almost separate from her brain, her hands shake a little, miniscule repetitive tremors that she can’t even feel. “everything’s broken,” eve says, and she means herself and the world and villanelle, too, mere feet away after she tried so hard to push them apart.

her eyes sting. she shuts them tighter. 

“everything’s broken already.” 

the thing they do not tell you about being shot with an arrow is that it hurts very, very badly.

villanelle hasn’t yet decided where it ranks, exactly, on the list of ways she has been injured and how painful they each were, but she can say with confidence that it’s top five. maybe top three. probably not number one, if only because whoever invented bullets knew they needed to outdo bow-and-arrows to make them a weapon anyone would use, and they did pretty well at that, all things considered, even if guns are on the more boring side to be on the operating end of.

anyways: the wound. it hurts. she’s trying to prop herself up on one arm to get a better view of eve — looking at eve is all she wants to do, all she has wanted to do for months, and if she had bled out in the street being held by eve she would only be halfway mad at the circumstances of her death — but every small movement pulls at her back, all of the little interconnected muscles making her wince with each attempt at motion. she settles for the half-view of eve she can get laying down, only sort of blocked by the doorway.

“ oh, eve, “ she says. it comes out halfway to pitying, the same way the church folk said oh, nell whenever she let slip something just honest enough to be concerning to good, upstanding citizens. poor eve, thinking everything is broken, even though villanelle is lying in her bed almost within arm’s reach.

if she had known being near-fatally wounded was all it would take to be back in eve’s good graces, she would have done it months ago.

“no,” he says shortly. “not really. especially not now.”

( the air still smells of salt. it always does, but it used to be stronger closer to the docks. now it’s everything. waterlogged, flooded, a ditch for the sea to rush into. the riddler wanted to wash everything away. to start over. a biblical flood. he said we’d be safe there. like noah in the ark, two righteous men who walked with god. 

arkham. the riddler would think it’s a good joke. ‘thumb drive’, after all. )

in the end, bruce spends the days drifting above gotham, and even then, it’s not good. good isn’t even a word in gotham’s vocabulary, if it were to have one. grime and rot stick to this place, a thin skin of it layered on top of everything. no one gets out clean, not really.

selina sits on the edge of the building like she isn’t even aware of the drop. he thinks of how easily she threw herself off the edge after kicking that cop over. she knows she can catch herself. cats always land on their feet. 

it’s dangerous territory, to be asked what he thinks about where gotham’s going. his weight shifts just imperceptibly, one foot to the other and then settling again, and he stares out towards a particular streetlight below. a yellow dot. turn all those streetlamps upside down and they would look like stars. 

( what i think is that, deep down, those men deserved it. that bruce wayne is no better than those men, at least in daylight. but at night i can be someone else. i can be an animal but i cannot be one that decides who dies on a whim. then there’s no difference between me and the element. )

“there’s a new mayor. some people seem to think that’s enough.” a mayor changes power but not people. they both know that. “… but i don’t know. everyone we mutually know is exactly the same. if anything, they’re worse. people say that things get worse before they get better. i guess we’ll see if that’s true.”

“ mm, that’s what i thought. “

selina prefers to stay realistic about this kind of thing: you take care of yourself and your people, first and foremost, even as the city falls to shit around you. scoop up your strays and run when there’s trouble you can’t fight off. selfish, maybe, but that’s what it takes to survive in gotham.

in the road below, a kid walks under the streetlights — impossible to make out any features from so high up, but she’s always had good vision, and besides, she can tell by the way they’re looking behind themselves every few seconds, that special flavor of fear that comes from being alone too young and not sure what to do with it yet.

she remembers that feeling. before she’d sharpened her claws, so to speak. she was never very good at being prey.

“ if either of us were the kinda people to think a new mayor could change anything — we wouldn’t be doing this, would we? “

she gestures with her mask, taken off and held loosely in one hand, finger scooped through the shoddily-cut eye holes to keep it from flying off into the wind. it isn’t that she thinks what they do is the same — everyone knows batman’s a hero, and scary as shit to boot, striking fear into the hearts of villains from mcmurdo to the bowery, while her scope is far more limited and far more self-serving. can’t compare scooping people out of the floodwater to a little bit of jewel thieving to pay the rent. but the root cause, that’s always the same, whether it’s selina or batman or the kid walking down the street with a knife gripped in their fist: it’s all about the city, the built-in inequality and the injustice that was flooding in way before the bombs went off. a new mayor can’t fix that, and she doubts batman can, either, but hey: at least he’s doing something.

vanya shrugs. what is a person, anyways, she thinks, and does not say, because she does not feel equipped to answer a question like that — she doesn't feel much like a person herself, most days.

(it used to be, she was unpersoned by her isolation — childhood into young adulthood into real, full-fledged adulthood, and in every era sitting in an empty bedroom, the only sounds being those she made herself. she'd faked being a person, sometimes, at orchestra practice or book signings that attracted less and less people as the months wore on, but never successfully for very long. she was never that good an actress; she leaves that skill to allison.

now, she is not-a-person in the same way her siblings are, the same way bruce is, set apart by a birds-eye-view of the city and the echo of its ever-present noise in her ribcage, her heart, her gut. people don't feel the honking of taxis as if it is going to claw its way out of their skin. they certainly don't pull buildings down around them when that clawing sound forces its way through.

at least, she's fairly sure they don't.)

" i'm not, either. if that makes it any better. " she's not sure it does, but she's pretty sure half of being a person is about being around other people — strength in numbers — so maybe the same logic applies to whatever it is they are instead.

she'd longed to feel like a person, at one point. ached with the weight of it. the yearning is still there, but it feels less present, now, less pressing. she pushes it down to the pit of her stomach.

" enemy action. " you scoff, but the effect is somewhat lost with a mouthful of stolen popcorn. the batman has shitty taste in popcorn, you note. or maybe he just doesn't keep the good stuff in his little secret hidey-hole. it's not stopping you from eating it, anyways; it took long enough to track this place down, and there aren't any decent restaurants in gotham that aren't constantly under attack by clowns. literal clowns, not dressed up as a birthday clown for one teensy weensy assassination clowns, but clowns that are clowns all of the time, which, frankly, disgusts you, as a concept.