when vanya was small â before she was vanya, still nameless little number seven â she would sneak out of bed in the middle of the night and walk, silent on tip-toes, through the academyâs 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, thereâs no way sheâd 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 threeâs 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, whoâs to say she couldnât see any ghosts lurking in the halls?
if she wanted to be truly special, not just copycatting her siblingsâ 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 â 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. ]
â youâve managed it better than i have, i think. changing shape in the dark. â 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 sheâd had would recognize bruce wayne in the batman. sheâd counted on the same being true for herself and the white violin, but â
â i mean, when i was a kid, i thought i could actually be invisible at night, but â when iâm all ⌠â she motions awkwardly, something halfway resembling lazy jazz-hands. â glow-y, itâs a little more difficult. â 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. â you camouflage better. â
â youâre right, though, more, uh, psychologically â itâs easier. way easier. to be someone else, something else. â
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."