#anyone wants to indulge me

now at this point in the cryptid runaway batman au, there’s a multitude of directions you could go based on your desired ratio of angst:humor:realism.

here’s one of them, that I’ll define as 40% angst, 40% humor, 20% realism (aka vibes over facts)

bruce runs away to his own basement and lives out of the batcave/wayne station. nobody who lives in the tower knows or cares that the station exists, which makes it the perfect home base for bruce, whose primary goals are freedom and revenge. Living off the streets means nobody has a chance to see his face and turn him into the Arkhams. Living under the tower gives him easy access to menace his evil relatives.

(side note: it’s important for this story that alfred doesn’t lose custody until bruce is 13 or 14, so that he can have already imparted important skills like “taking down a man twice your size” and “scaling the interior of an elevator shaft” before they’re separated.)

he learns stealth by becoming the poltergeist that haunts Wayne Tower. he takes food from the fridge, money from people’s wallets, a little bit at a time. he hides things and shifts furniture ever so slightly and fucks with light fixtures that they flicker constantly. he plays cat and mouse with building security while making them doubt their sanity. subtlety is the name of the game here – he can’t have anyone suspect he stayed in Gotham after he ran.

but he also needs to get out of the tower, without anyone recognizing him as the tabloid’s favorite object of derision/pity/obsession. bruce being bruce, his solution to this problem is the full batman getup. He doesn’t pause midway through in a ski mask and sweatpants. He doesn’t try stage makeup + radical haircut (yet – he’ll absolutely try that later in life). He does keep a hoodie, baseball hat and sunglasses in his bag, but only for if he needs batman to disappear, not for disguising bruce wayne purposes.

at first he’s just wandering around the city at night. but wandering around Gotham at night inevitably leads a person to encounter crimes and, well. bruce has a lot of anger to work through. he starts looking for trouble. he starts noticing that he tends to find trouble in the same sorts of places, being visited on the same sorts of people. word starts going around, and the people he saves start telling him about other people they know who could use his help.

entirely unintentionally he becomes the cryptid guardian angel of Gotham’s late night convenience stores and diners, of her immigrants and homeless, of her late-night workers and the residents of subsidized housing.

he gets free rides in taxi cabs around town and they tell him about all the shit they’ve seen on the streets. the women of the Iceberg Lounge patch him up in their apartments and tell him about the people they’ve seen in the club who shouldn’t be there. the people he meets on the subway tell him about Renewal construction contracts bled dry and hospital budgets siphoned away and a war on drugs that cares nothing for drug users.

He doesn’t say much, but he’s a very good listener. And when he starts to put together the pieces, that’s the beginning of the end for Falcone’s reign over his city.