#this wonderful au again
hey guess who has two thumbs and just spent 5 hours straight writing another batman AU?
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Batman wasn’t a person.
He faked it very well. When the League gathered, the line of his mask against pale skin looked natural and human, a little more perfectly fitted than the Flash’s but not quite as perfect as Green Lantern’s, which was an energy projection and not a real object and thus lay against his face flawlessly, without shift or gap.
His mouth didn’t bend into many expressions and his body language wasn’t voluble, but the emotive gestures that he did make were pretty normal. The rare smile seemed honest. He had a heartbeat, perfectly steady. His shadow (almost) always matched the shape that was blocking the light.
The stories that came out of Gotham, about the Bat—those could be exaggerations, born of terror and manipulated perception. Clark, of all people, knew how much you could convince people to believe things that weren’t real, because they made a better story. Even the scraps of photography and film showing a towering thing of black fog and long fangs could have been some clever trick with projectors.
The fact that Superman couldn’t see through his suit just meant it was well made.
He’d had to pool his observations with Diana and J’onn before he’d been sure he wasn’t imagining things. But Martian Manhunter knew shapeshifting, and said the block against his mind when he tried to touch Batman’s thoughts did not feel quite human. And Superman knew what posing as human looked like. And Wonder Woman knew truth, and its absence.
Batman wasn’t human. Which wasn’t the problem, of course.
The problem was that he was pretending he was. Pretending it rigorously in a situation where there shouldn’t be any need, unless he had something worse to hide. Pretending it in a way that overlaid on a certain inhuman predatory grace began to look very dangerous indeed.
Superman could see both things in him now, watching narrow-eyed through a roof into the room where Batman bent over a child’s bed, cape swirling up larger and darker than he let it get around them. The man and the hungry creature, flipping in and out of focus, neither ever gone but superimposed, like a trick picture that was two things at once.
Knuckles ghosted over the boy’s cheek, claws turned inward, and the child sighed softly, and sunk deeper into sleep. Batman’s heart wasn’t beating, but Clark could monitor the child’s vitals easily from here.
Batman drew his hand back, and tipped his head up—looking back at Superman as though the roof was no more a barrier to his perceptions than to Clark’s. Waited a beat, as if making sure his attention had been noticed, and then passed soundlessly between the other beds to the window, slid it open, and launched himself out through it and up onto the roof.
He didn’t bother to restrain himself to even a plausible approximation of human limits, now. The arm he reached up to the edge of the roof to pivot himself up by was too long, and his shoulder rotated further than it should have been able to, and he landed with impossible soundlessness in a billow of cape that was far, far larger than any cape that only reached to his heels should have managed, and which faded out at the edges into shadow. He knew he was found out.
Superman took the obvious invitation, and sunk down to join him. It was better, sitting like this, facing the same way on the ridgepole of a two-story building. Batman hadn’t hurt that child, that he could tell. There was no need to make this a confrontation.
“I don’t understand why,” he said at last. Out of deference for sleeping children, he kept his voice soft—he would have worried about a human being able to hear it, but now he knew he didn’t have to worry about that with Batman. “Why go to so much trouble to deceive us? We haven’t kept secret what we are. Not from you.”
Alien, alien, user of alien weapon, magical princess…
Batman sighed. He spoke almost as softly as Clark had, and his voice sounded the same as ever, except for the fact that a human voice couldn’t get this quiet without falling into a whisper. “I’m not like you.” He turned.
He’d let some of the details of his human mask fall away—what must have been the exhaustively rendered texture of skin, the flakes of dry skin on chapping lips, a crease at the corner of his mouth that had suggested he scowled or smiled more, outside of his costume. There was no pretense of a jawbone, under the skin, though the jawline externally hadn’t changed. The cowl still looked like something he was wearing, but Clark knew it was not. It flexed like skin when Batman narrowed his blank white eyes and said, “I can see you know that.”
“You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”
Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”
“Batman…”
“You’re confronting me now because you’re worried about my intentions toward Dick. He changed your mind about something. Ergo, you’ve been sitting on this for a while. How long have you known I wasn’t real?”
[reblogging this with the same edited version of the second part that i put on AO3:]
Robin flew.
He’d kept in condition for four years with no audience, no ring. A net he’d got, at least, by terrifying Alfred enough times. A catcher, he’d gotten by jumping and knowing Batman would be there, until Batman stopped expecting any different.
But even the deepest parts of the caves that riddled the bluffs beneath the house didn’t measure up to the circus, or to this.
The one light that he always carried with him on his explorations flickering wildly over stalactites and gleaming-wet walls and startled streams of bats, as he spun down through the dark until it rose up to embrace him in dark wings…that was always an amazing sight, a beauty and a privilege to witness flashing over the secrets of the underground, but he’d been born for footlight and spotlight. The distant glittering of Gotham spread out underfoot was so much closer to where he belonged.
He made the landing clean, boots connecting with rooftop ever so gently and his knees absorbing the last of the force by folding, until his hand in its bright glove touched, too, just as he ran out of momentum. “See?” he said. Stood up, so he could look out across the lights below, and rolled his shoulders back as if shaking out a set of feathers he had never had. His bright cape was too soft to make much sound.
“I do.”
There was reserve in the voice that spoke out of the shadow of the skyscraper’s great spire, which stretched up into what had to be more lightning rod than anything needed, but Dick ignored that. His point was made.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said.
Batman jumped from the crag of stone overlooking the canyon as she caught up, and Diana’s heart leapt into her mouth.
Her lasso closed around him and stopped his motion short, only seconds into the plunge.
He hung as a dead weight at the end of the golden rope, all prickling outrage and sharp angles, as Wonder Woman hauled him up again, hand over hand.
“Were you expecting me to change?” he bit out, as she pulled him back onto solid stone.
His arms lay pinned against his sides and his cape hung in infinite limp folds around him, but under the touch of the Lasso he had neither subsided into something purely human, nor melted into something that made no pretense of it.
She hadn’t thought he would. Now, she knew he wouldn’t.
Diana placed her hand over the slipknot at the center of his chest. Drawn tight, it wouldn’t loosen again without her permission. He was bigger than usual, his eyes blank almonds of white in the black of his cowl, his mouth a tight and lipless line. “I expected you to fall,” she said. “Can you fly, really?”
Pretending not to be able to, if he could, had been giving everyone a very hard time, just to pass as an ordinary man. Especially after three of them had figured him out, anyway. No one would have been shocked if the bat-themed vigilante had flown to begin with.
Certainly not half as shocked as the Flash had been, not ten minutes ago, to watch him take a sword to the chest and rather than fall unfold into a nightmare thing with ten-inch claws and a body of leaping shadows briefly fifteen feet wide, that was solid enough to absorb the wall of bullets coming toward the immobilized speedster and several shrieking children.
Not even as shocked as she had been to arrive and cut down the men with full-automatic rifles moments later, ending the threat, only to watch the Batman gather himself back into the shape of a man, turn, and run.
A knock at Leslie’s door woke her. It was two in the morning. She grabbed her bat, although mostly people wanting to rob or vandalize the clinic didn’t knock.
Once, after all, she’d had representatives of a gang planning to kidnap her so they could force her to treat their leader open with polite knocking. So annoying. It wasn’t as if she’d have refused if they’d just asked, but oh no, they wanted to be in control. So she opened the door only a crack, and with the bat back for a swing, out of learned caution.
It turned out to be Alfred.
They hadn’t spoken in years. Large checks came every month from him personally and from the Foundation, but after grimly doing the duty of hauling him out of that mausoleum of a mansion a few times in the first few years after they lost Bruce, to make sure he didn’t die of self-neglect, and engaging in a couple of necessary and cathartic but absolutely horrible screaming matches, Leslie hadn’t sought him out again. Not for over a decade. He’d certainly never reached out to her.
His turning up at her door at two in the morning had never crossed her mind as a possibility.
Still. She knew him. He would have some kind of reason, even if it was only the desperate reaching-out of a man in the depths of a mental breakdown.
She stepped back out of the doorway. “You’d better come inside.”
