#cryptid runaway batman au
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.
au idea I’ve been rotating in my brain lately: cryptid runaway batman
so this starts with me thinking: “if Bruce had started out getting information from the POV of people facing violence and poverty in Gotham instead of exclusively the police and TV news I bet he could have figured out the Renewal conspiracy long before The Riddler.”
so then I go: “what dominoes would need to fall to make that happen?”
and we get cryptid runaway batman
the first thing we need is some evil relatives. For this purpose I have invented Samantha and Rich Arkham, Martha’s younger sister and her husband. Martha and Thomas leave custody of their beloved son to their closest friend, Alfred Pennyworth. Samantha Arkham objects. There’s a protracted legal battle that ends with her and her husband taking custody of Bruce and taking up residence in the tower.
next we need Bruce’s neurodivergence and self-destructive tendencies to become public knowledge. In canon, he avoids this by (1) isolating like a champ, (2) having Alfred there to cover for him, (3) following the advice drilled into him by his mother who had been so traumatized by her experience with institutionalization that she would never let her son be evaluated by a psychiatrist. In the absence of Alfred and surrounded by normal, upper crust relatives that expect complete conformity, this is all going to break down.
next we need Alfred out of the picture. He’s not dead, don’t worry. He’s arrested for child abduction after he tries to get Bruce out of the country. That’s a felony and he’s a green-card holder, so that allows the US Government (with some encouragement from the Arkhams) to have him deported back to the UK.
then all we need is something to give Samantha and Rich Arkham control of the family fortune and Bruce’s life indefinitely, even after Bruce would have come of age. A conservatorship does the trick neatly. Clearly Bruce needs responsible, capable adults to take care of the company, to ensure he gets the psychiatric help and medication he need. A judge puts them in charge of his life, his money, and his mind.
and
bruce
runs
au idea I’ve been rotating in my brain lately: cryptid runaway batman
so this starts with me thinking: “if Bruce had started out getting information from the POV of people facing violence and poverty in Gotham instead of exclusively the police and TV news I bet he could have figured out the Renewal conspiracy long before The Riddler.”
so then I go: “what dominoes would need to fall to make that happen?”
and we get cryptid runaway batman
