Batman, By Definition
Nov. 16th, 2006 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shankieI'm not sure if this counts as a fic or a ficlet. Long ago, I talked about this idea I had about writing a Bruce who discovered... well, you'll see. One of those things I wrote really quickly and barely re-read, let alone betaed.
Batman, By Definition
Batman, Superman. Might be a PG or a PG-13.
Bruce has examined himself with depth, but has never done an in-depth analysis on his own DNA. The results require some discussion.
He was familiar with the sight of his own blood. Pooling deep scarlet that would dry to an ugly brown black as anyone’s did, and it was that he kept very close. With many things held intimate to his mind, that he wouldn’t forget, that he would never lapse into reckless abandon or lest his mind wander to a place that would keep him from his dedication.
Blood, that tasted heavy sweet and like iron in his mouth, that he was also familiar with. How it would smudge on the ends of his fingers or the patterns it made in smears and splatters. He knew what blood was better than most, his own the best of all.
It was many years before he realized the lie of that.
Of all the DNA analysis he’d completed in his time, both casual to eliminate suspects, or acutely important to find a killer, unlock some secret of an ailing metahuman in need of extraordinary measures. Or even discover a meta for what they were.
DNA was easy to collect, simple to process, its secrets known to him.
Like the jewel of the violence of blood, he knew it, as well as the smell of cordite and the burn of a gunshot wound. His life was lived in violence, and it was that language he spoke, whispering to it like lovers in the dark to bring forth her hidden bounty, or an assault in the cover of night, swift and brutal, only to find his lover there again, draped over furniture or floors and beckoning that he unravel every inch.
This night, there was no crusade luring him, no violence to heat his blood, and he contemplated a single vial in his fingers, black-red and thickly catching the light of his work lamp in a crimson glow. His blood.
He’d never subjected it to such analysis as so many others, and curiosity drove him to it on this quiet night, with nothing but the screeches of bats on their journey to hunt, flapping quiet chaos in the arches of his cave. Driven out before, but always, they returned.
If he held it in his hand long enough, it would begin to thicken and lose its macabre beauty, and he touched the needle mark in the crook of his elbow to think of how much blood had been wasted and spilled after so many years. In distant, alien worlds or fights that never felt as his own just as much as in the close corridors of Gotham, his lover’s boudoir and the seat of his soul.
The centrifuge hummed, the computers clicked quietly in their work, and he sharpened his batarangs to razor edges, waiting with a patience tested and forced into its strength. The glow of the monitors and the plastic edges of technology all took on the glow of a shrine to his humble offering, like a prayer to the faceless gods of vengeance made in contemplation.
It is a strange thing, to realize a fear long held, to suddenly be aware of it’s presence, striking viciously at sensibility and creating entropy everywhere it touched.
The lines and strings of decimaled numbers were familiar, and known to him, but not entirely in its humanity.
The printed out sheets of long technical analysis and the monitors still glowing told him something that had to be a lie, and he repeated the process long after dawn would be breaking somewhere above his work.
He flicked off the monitor, and saw his reflection in the blankness of black in contrast, light lining his sharp features and accenting the deep circles under his tired eyes, and he saw it as a stranger, turning away and looking at the most recent pinprick in his arm, still with a hard bead of blood dry there, black and dead, but there for healing, a faint bruise of his molestation of the skin around it.
There was still a watch he kept in his utility belt; the face no longer kept time, but it was the simple technology underneath he beckoned, as he hadn’t for many years, and waited.
When Superman arrived, he looked understandably curious. With so many ways to contact him, that Batman would choose the thing given long in the past, perhaps thinking it had been discarded or thought obsolete some time ago.
“Bruce, what is it?” He had a worried crease between his brows, his arms defensively crossed over his chest as he did, the red cape gliding down his back, but it was never like his own. It ended at his calves, an adornment without weights and Kevlar weaves, rippling in the memory of motion around legs wound strong of unearthly materials.
“How long have you known?” He threw a vial of his blood on the stone at Clark’s feet, where it splattered and shattered and bled like doubt in his mind.
“Bruce, I…”
“How long!?” he cried, standing angrily and throwing his cowl into the splatter of crimson on the ground, tearing off his heavy cape and wishing the symbol on his chest would tear away so easily. Designed to withstand more brutal assaults then his grip in it, the fabric held, and did no more than give some. “I’m not human. How could you keep that from me,” he said in defeat. “Everything I’ve done is a lie!”
“I am not human. You are.”
“Semantics don’t change anything.”
Clark sighed and began pacing, worrying at his hips as if wishing there were pockets there to stuff his hands into, rubbing the bridge of his nose at a pair of spectacles that weren’t sitting there. “Since Starro.”
“You never told me.”
“If you didn’t already know, I… I didn’t know how. You held it so close to you… were so proud that you could be so powerful without falling back on superpowers. Thought it was just a crutch for everyone else. What was I supposed to say?”
They regarded one another, and for the first time in distant memory, Bruce was the first to look away.
He was a meta. He was like everyone else now, another human blessed with some chance of genetics to rise above the others, but a gift more insidious in its subtlety. It was likely standard testing would never see how the RNA translated little changes to the human template. Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what the metagenes were doing in his body; but he could make several educated assumptions, hating how so many things began to make better logical sense than before.
It wasn’t much. It was enough.
“You never said anything.”
“Not a word, to anyone. God as my witness.”
Bruce stood in his raiment, feeling very much like a king that had stolen his crown and cheated into his kingdom, standing proudly in it all the same.
“I’m not interested in what any god would have to say on this matter, or any.” He’d stood before enough to know the truth of it acutely, and gripped the cape in his hands before he reattached it to his shoulders, let it drape around him like strength.
Clark looked vastly relieved. “So… you aren’t going to just… quit, then?”
”No.”
“But I thought…”
“My work is more important than I am,” he replied dismissively. “It is just another obstacle to be overcome.”
It didn’t feel true until he was alone again, breathing in the musty age of his throne room, if that was the metaphor he chose to use.
It felt appropriate, as he returned to his purveyances of the world, and noted the latest Biaylan uprising would require attention.
He'd lied to himself before, and he could do it again.
Batman, By Definition
Batman, Superman. Might be a PG or a PG-13.
Bruce has examined himself with depth, but has never done an in-depth analysis on his own DNA. The results require some discussion.
He was familiar with the sight of his own blood. Pooling deep scarlet that would dry to an ugly brown black as anyone’s did, and it was that he kept very close. With many things held intimate to his mind, that he wouldn’t forget, that he would never lapse into reckless abandon or lest his mind wander to a place that would keep him from his dedication.
Blood, that tasted heavy sweet and like iron in his mouth, that he was also familiar with. How it would smudge on the ends of his fingers or the patterns it made in smears and splatters. He knew what blood was better than most, his own the best of all.
It was many years before he realized the lie of that.
Of all the DNA analysis he’d completed in his time, both casual to eliminate suspects, or acutely important to find a killer, unlock some secret of an ailing metahuman in need of extraordinary measures. Or even discover a meta for what they were.
DNA was easy to collect, simple to process, its secrets known to him.
Like the jewel of the violence of blood, he knew it, as well as the smell of cordite and the burn of a gunshot wound. His life was lived in violence, and it was that language he spoke, whispering to it like lovers in the dark to bring forth her hidden bounty, or an assault in the cover of night, swift and brutal, only to find his lover there again, draped over furniture or floors and beckoning that he unravel every inch.
This night, there was no crusade luring him, no violence to heat his blood, and he contemplated a single vial in his fingers, black-red and thickly catching the light of his work lamp in a crimson glow. His blood.
He’d never subjected it to such analysis as so many others, and curiosity drove him to it on this quiet night, with nothing but the screeches of bats on their journey to hunt, flapping quiet chaos in the arches of his cave. Driven out before, but always, they returned.
If he held it in his hand long enough, it would begin to thicken and lose its macabre beauty, and he touched the needle mark in the crook of his elbow to think of how much blood had been wasted and spilled after so many years. In distant, alien worlds or fights that never felt as his own just as much as in the close corridors of Gotham, his lover’s boudoir and the seat of his soul.
The centrifuge hummed, the computers clicked quietly in their work, and he sharpened his batarangs to razor edges, waiting with a patience tested and forced into its strength. The glow of the monitors and the plastic edges of technology all took on the glow of a shrine to his humble offering, like a prayer to the faceless gods of vengeance made in contemplation.
It is a strange thing, to realize a fear long held, to suddenly be aware of it’s presence, striking viciously at sensibility and creating entropy everywhere it touched.
The lines and strings of decimaled numbers were familiar, and known to him, but not entirely in its humanity.
The printed out sheets of long technical analysis and the monitors still glowing told him something that had to be a lie, and he repeated the process long after dawn would be breaking somewhere above his work.
He flicked off the monitor, and saw his reflection in the blankness of black in contrast, light lining his sharp features and accenting the deep circles under his tired eyes, and he saw it as a stranger, turning away and looking at the most recent pinprick in his arm, still with a hard bead of blood dry there, black and dead, but there for healing, a faint bruise of his molestation of the skin around it.
There was still a watch he kept in his utility belt; the face no longer kept time, but it was the simple technology underneath he beckoned, as he hadn’t for many years, and waited.
When Superman arrived, he looked understandably curious. With so many ways to contact him, that Batman would choose the thing given long in the past, perhaps thinking it had been discarded or thought obsolete some time ago.
“Bruce, what is it?” He had a worried crease between his brows, his arms defensively crossed over his chest as he did, the red cape gliding down his back, but it was never like his own. It ended at his calves, an adornment without weights and Kevlar weaves, rippling in the memory of motion around legs wound strong of unearthly materials.
“How long have you known?” He threw a vial of his blood on the stone at Clark’s feet, where it splattered and shattered and bled like doubt in his mind.
“Bruce, I…”
“How long!?” he cried, standing angrily and throwing his cowl into the splatter of crimson on the ground, tearing off his heavy cape and wishing the symbol on his chest would tear away so easily. Designed to withstand more brutal assaults then his grip in it, the fabric held, and did no more than give some. “I’m not human. How could you keep that from me,” he said in defeat. “Everything I’ve done is a lie!”
“I am not human. You are.”
“Semantics don’t change anything.”
Clark sighed and began pacing, worrying at his hips as if wishing there were pockets there to stuff his hands into, rubbing the bridge of his nose at a pair of spectacles that weren’t sitting there. “Since Starro.”
“You never told me.”
“If you didn’t already know, I… I didn’t know how. You held it so close to you… were so proud that you could be so powerful without falling back on superpowers. Thought it was just a crutch for everyone else. What was I supposed to say?”
They regarded one another, and for the first time in distant memory, Bruce was the first to look away.
He was a meta. He was like everyone else now, another human blessed with some chance of genetics to rise above the others, but a gift more insidious in its subtlety. It was likely standard testing would never see how the RNA translated little changes to the human template. Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what the metagenes were doing in his body; but he could make several educated assumptions, hating how so many things began to make better logical sense than before.
It wasn’t much. It was enough.
“You never said anything.”
“Not a word, to anyone. God as my witness.”
Bruce stood in his raiment, feeling very much like a king that had stolen his crown and cheated into his kingdom, standing proudly in it all the same.
“I’m not interested in what any god would have to say on this matter, or any.” He’d stood before enough to know the truth of it acutely, and gripped the cape in his hands before he reattached it to his shoulders, let it drape around him like strength.
Clark looked vastly relieved. “So… you aren’t going to just… quit, then?”
”No.”
“But I thought…”
“My work is more important than I am,” he replied dismissively. “It is just another obstacle to be overcome.”
It didn’t feel true until he was alone again, breathing in the musty age of his throne room, if that was the metaphor he chose to use.
It felt appropriate, as he returned to his purveyances of the world, and noted the latest Biaylan uprising would require attention.
He'd lied to himself before, and he could do it again.