semblances.

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.

“ is that where you learned so much about cars? ” an opening for him, if he wants to back away from the talk of identity and shapeshifting and whether the masks they wear in the dark are who they really are — and besides, she’s interested.

his fingers fold a little tighter around his mug. a tiny adjustment in pressure. vanya's apartment is nice. smaller than wayne tower — but then again, what isn't in gotham? he's read about the panopticon. imagines that it might be why he became what he is now. all that time, overlooking the city, looking down at it. gotham used to not feel real when he was younger. the city he was in felt like a story that he was being told. maybe that was why he always wanted to get out. to go downstairs. out into the street. to be anyone else, to be a part of the city, and then, as he has gotten older, to change it.

but vanya's apartment is grounded. here. it's quiet, and he doesn't mind that the coffee is a little burnt. alfred would complain, but alfred isn't here.

he used to sneak out to late night coffee shops after races. no one would ever suspect. he was just a teenager with a fast car that didn't even look that expensive because of how much he had modified it. matte paint job. dented. scratched. worn down. with how often he was racing he never had time to care about how pretty it was. he only really cared about how well it performed. the corvette was what took up his time when it came to beauty.

but of course, that wasn't about him. that was about —

"i did that too," he admits. "harder to sneak out when you had to take an elevator to get to the ground floor at a decent pace. sometimes i took the stairs all the way down."

he learned how to hop railings from that, floors upon floors down. he almost fell, balanced, teetered, and got faster. always forcing himself to do better. to do more.

bruce nods after a moment. "my father liked cars too. he didn't work on them as much as i did, but... he was a surgeon. different way to treat your hands." like a joke whose punchline only matters to him. "we had the family car. or — i still have it. a '63 corvette. split window design, which they only put out during that year. it's the one i keep looking nice for... for when i'm me, i guess. when i'm not in the suit. but the other car. the one i take out at night. that used to be a '70 dodge charger. raced in it. when i decided to start doing all this, i took the roof off to change the shape. bigger tires. triton v10 on the back." a pause, as if he doesn't realize. "sorry. a v10 engine is supposed to be in something like... like the e-series cutaway. a hauler. you don't need something that big in a charger. unless... well." a flicker of a smile, the corner of his mouth turning up in something wry. almost embarrassed. "unless you're using it for to chase the penguin down on the freeway, i guess."

he almost sounds surprised at himself. then he shrugs, as if brushing all of the work aside. parts for the car are still sitting in his workshop, things he could attach or replace on a whim.

he watches her for a moment, as if he's never thought about it before.

this isn't true. bruce thinks about everyone who has ever been close to him. often. alfred is easy. selina isn't easy, but he's getting better at it. vanya is newest, but he's still thought about her.

vanya looks smaller like this. still in the suit leeched of all color, but not glowing, not drifting a foot and a half off the ground. secretly, bruce has been trying to discern how he could get an edge in a fight against her, given that something goes terribly wrong. a therapist alfred sent him to once as a teacher called this catastrophizing. said it was common when you had something terrible happen to you at such a young age. but it feels reasonable, when it comes to the white violin.

( how could i win, given the worst case scenario? i don't think it would happen, but it's always worth thinking about. i think the white violin could turn anything i threw at her to dust. getting too close seems like assured suicide. the suit can protect me from bullets but not from that.

but she's not omniscient. she can't perfectly predict where i am or what i do. she is reactive. so if she doesn't see me coming, then there's nothing to react to.

it's good to have these kinds of contingencies. )

it isn't even something specific to her. he'd do it to anyone else, too. to know how to win, given the opportunity.

when he looks at her, he sees —

"you're a good person," bruce says abruptly. "and i'm not saying you haven't done terrible things." before she can interrupt and disagree. he pauses. doesn't glance down at his shoes or aside like he might when he is out of the suit, when he's the prince of gotham and not this. "i think you're capable of terrible things. i've seen how much you can do." vanya, he thinks, could rip through a city block in the moments it would take for him to scale it.

she is an atomic bomb.

but she's also a person. who wrote a book. who suffered. who talks to him about cars and has tried and failed to teach him to play violin, even if he knows how to read treble clef as well as she does. alfred made him learn treble and bass clef. said something about a proper education.

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.

“ are you? “ her hand lingers against his cheek a second longer before falling back to her side. selina’s searching for something in his face, but she couldn’t tell you what — some sign he’s okay, behind the violence that’s curled up in him like a snake, maybe.

he's half-reading her lips more than hearing her voice. the ringing is settling, enough that it's just going to transition into a low throb in his head. he comes home from these nights with headaches more often than not. the suit absorbs most of the impact, but not the noise. earplugs wouldn't let him hear someone sneaking up behind him. people have tried it before, and the whole point of him is to be able to hit first and hit harder.

and maybe too much, sometimes. but there's a line. there's always a line.

he feels the vibration through his hands. the frisson of impact, from when the first guy swung around with the gun and he grabbed and pulled, the barrel smacking into his palms as his fingers folded around it.

the vision of something white draws his gaze back down for a moment. the man's mouth is open. lip bleeding red over the white of a tooth. it's color, lurid and sharp against the dark haze of gotham streets. sooner or later, though, it's going to dry down black. then it won't be distinguishable from everything else.

bruce blinks. tries to settle more in himself. selina's gloved fingers brush gently over his cheek, a barrier of fabric between their skin. he closes his eyes for a moment and exhales. "i'm fine." said like it's certain. 

( i watch the man's face turn into a gory collage of blood and bone, and i wonder if that's true. if i lied to selina in that moment. it’s too late to change it now, though. everything that i see on the screen already happened. )

after a moment, he crouches down again, fabric creaking and rustling. the cape pools around his boots. he begins to go through the man's pockets, slow, methodical. no point in pausing to let the lenses capture the face. there is barely a face left to capture. it takes a few moments to find the man's wallet tucked within his jacket pocket. flips through it. examines the id with the awkward smile peering out at him, and then pulls out the second older id behind it. fake in front.

he's seen that name, on the real card. where?

"you know him?" he flips the id towards her.

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. ”

“ you’re right, though, more, uh, psychologically — it’s easier. way easier. to be someone else, something else. ”

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.

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.

“ 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.

“ we’ll see, though. we’re overdue for better at this point, and — not to jinx it, but there’s only so far worse you can get, right? “

as bruce wayne, just once, he drove out to falcone's grave.

he waited a while. figured that there'd be a few guys lingering around just to see who came to pay their respects to a rat. the last thing he needed was to have another target painted on his head as bruce wayne. he's already seen what people are saying in private — bruce wayne, son of a murderer and a madwoman. no one's said it to his face, not yet, but he can tell what they're thinking when he looks the other way.

alone, he stood there at falcone's grave. tried to imagine all the things he didn't know. how there was no certain truth. how he'd been waiting twenty years and didn't have any definite answers. could've been him. could've been maroni. could've been nothing but a matter of chance, someone poor who didn't fully comprehend who he was stealing from and just needed the money. nothing is settled. nothing is resolved. but there is only one direction.

selina's right, he knows. nothing changes on its own. gotham's systems are fundamentally corrupt. he would know, now. his father helped build the engine for it.

"she thinks she can do something," he says. "that's a start. even wanting to." getting rid of renewal and replacing it with something better. most of the mob are terrified to touch renewal now, after everything with the riddler. they act like even using it will get them a target painted on their backs. so if the mayor wants to get rid of it and start something new, now is the moment. before they get brave again.

a pause. he peers down at the streets below. tries to imagine worse. maybe if arkham had been breached. mostly the particular wing he's thinking about. the riddler right back out on the street. and —

well. the rest of them. he tries not to think about it too much.

"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 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. 

“ ’s it ever really a good time to be in gotham? ”

for some people — powerful people, in ivory towers where the floods can’t reach — maybe it is. that’s never been the view of the city selina’s gotten. sure, from up on rooftops it almost looks beautiful down there — but only with the blur of distance making everything hazy.

( so why’d you come back? that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? she’d gotten her bags packed and the city in her rearview and then …

that’s the secret: you can never really leave gotham. it’s a shithole of a city, but once it digs its claws into you, it’ll haunt you for the rest of your life, no matter where you escape to. it’s vicious like that.

… so she’d turned around. eventually. should’ve known the city wouldn’t let her go so easy. )

she looks down ( and down, and down — ), one leg dangling off the edge of the roof. ( she’s never had an issue with heights. don’t you know cats always land on their feet? ) and she looks back at batman, as if comparing the city to the man. if gotham’s a riptide to her, dragging her back into its depths, it’s something else entirely to him. a mirror, maybe.

“ you really think it’s gonna change, vengeance? ” turn it back around on him. the last word’s both nickname and rebuttal: don’t do the neutral politician bullshit, not with me, not when we both know what it’s like to ache with the need for some kind of justice in this fucked-up town. she’s not exempt, when she says the town thrives on hate. she doesn’t think he is, either. “ c'mon, tell me how you really feel. ”

“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. )