UPDATED AUTHOR'S NOTE; WUWAC is being rewritten and will resume updates once I'm finished! This chapter has been rewritten and I will be starting on chapter two soon. (Which is probably going to double in word count at least)
I have a blog now for my fanfiction, and this has a full changelog if you're wondering what I did to the chapter. Go to .com to see it, the changelog should be the first post (if you're reading this around March 8th, 2014) or otherwise very early on the 'alex speaks' tag.
ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE; This is an Alternate Universe set around the idea that Bruce Wayne and Jack Napier know each other, and have an established relationship. I am mostly using a modified comic 'verse for designs, with some flair of my own and I can't really say where the plot or universe as a whole is going. Consider this something of a character study with cases and sexless romance thrown throughout. (Sorry guys, keeping this teen rated.) If all goes according to plan, this is going to be a monster of a fic.
It all started with the bats.
In his youth, Bruce Wayne had watched them fly over the grounds, small squeaks keeping him awake no matter how far away they were. A fear sickened him whenever he saw their forms against the distant lights of Gotham and with his fear came something worst, a craving, an itch he couldn't scratch.
Bruce knew he had been born wrong.
He was subtly different – enough to drive other children away, make adults' smiles freeze on their faces. Alfred gave him looks of anger mixed with disappointed (though Bruce suspected that the anger was never really directed at him) and his parents always looked sad, as if they had failed.
This wrongness possessed him, unsettled him as much as the bats did. Made him feel as if he'd been set at an uneven angle, forever left to leave awkwardly.
One night the strangeness overtook him, altered his dreams and drove him to pace the floor, barely six years old. He could feel it growing like a fever, too big for his head, splitting his skull in an attempt to escape.
Finally, he could take it no longer. He took a small blanket off his bed and a knife from the kitchen when he left out the back door.
He walked all the way to the tree line, his bare feet slippery with dew and the hem of his pants quickly growing soaked. There he waited, heart beating so loud he thought it would burst, toes curling in the cold grass.
When they came racing past, their small black bodies almost freezing him in place, he swept his blanket through the air until he caught one.
And he tore it to pieces, splintering bone and skin beneath nail and knife, its cries sending the others into frenzy.
The body rested next to a large oak for ages and he returned to the same spot for many months, the mangled corpse stirring something deep inside of him, washing a wave of quiet over his strangeness.
For a while the attack starved off the dreams and thoughts, the strange desires and the strange wrongness, but they slowly returned, building up to a point where he could not go near the tree at all and the shrieks seemed to follow him everywhere he went.
So he attacked again, and again, and again.
Then, their little bodies and leathered wings started to become dull. He moved onto mice that he found in burrows, rabbits that he trapped with rope and it kept going on and on until he could barely stop thinking about it, the desire consuming his every waking minute and so many of the sleeping.
Then, as these things often do, a breaking point was reached.
His mother bought a dog from a shelter, a small creature that had mangled ears, a half-matted coat. It that growled at the youngest Wayne constantly. His parents just laughed, for they did not want to acknowledge their son's blank stare.
The dog followed him around, barking and growling, and this continued for weeks. His dreams had turned to a vicious barking, no longer filled with the bats that had long since chosen other hunting grounds over the dangerous lawn. The noise shook him, an act within itself that was humiliating and painful against his skin.
So one night, as he had done so many times before, he lured the damned beast out, into the trees and the darkness that had become a home away from home, and he struck it through the throat.
It didn't die at first, instead wobbled around for a few seconds, before sinking into the small stream that ran not far from his oak. It wheezed painfully, dark eyes and half-broken teeth bared at him so.
It was angry, as only an animal could be. Terror was layered across it's face, licking at the last shreds of energy it had. In the painful few moments before it stopped breathing entirely, it choked one last bark, watery and weak.
Bruce shuddered once more at its cursed noises, and that was that. Bruce crawled back into bed, and put aside the dreams, as he did after such events, and considered the matter closed.
He was awoken in the morning by his mother's bawling.
His father had explained, sadness in his eyes (at the loss of a pathetic creature? Or at the fact that Thomas Wayne didn't know if his son understood emotion?) and explained that the dog had wandered out in the night and been attacked by some creature.
For the first time, an uncomfortable feeling settled on the aftermath, seeing his parents so devastated and invested in this thing that was his. They were not supposed to upset, didn't they understand? This was all just to make him feel better. The dog was a factor, just as useful as a good movie or a bowl of ice cream on a warm day. The dog was not important.
Expect apparently it was. For across the room, Alfred fixed upon him a look that said very clearly, in the only hints of body language the young boy understood, that he knew that it hadn't been a raccoon that had taken Martha Wayne's dog.
One day turned to a week, and through it, there was nothing but the sniffles and whispers. But every sound just stood to erase all others. He had done this. He had made a mistake. It was almost as if they didn't love him anymore, when they grieved.
He wanted that. It was his. Always had. Always would be.
So Bruce Wayne swallowed his desires and decided that there would be no more bats or mice or much larger things, for he was coming to an age where people had told him what was wrong and what was not, and he knew now what he had done was wrong.
He saw no more death, witnessed no more pain, until the fateful day that a lone mugger wandered into the wrong alley, as did they.
And then Bruce decided, that violence wasn't as much fun as it had been before.
. . .
When Bruce was twelve, he devolved a habit of hitting people.
In general, he devolved a lot of habits. The school he went to was full of rich brats, and most of them were unruly and mean spirited. Bruce was mostly invisible - unnerving and at the exact grade average in which people were not seen nor worried about. On occasion, they would run a news story on the Waynes, and he would find himself momentarily in the centre of a pityfrst, before vanishing once again.
He used this cloak to pick fights.
Not in his school - obviously, but outside. Skipping class was a frequent, not all that judged upon in bored, over-paid classrooms. He switched his clothes in the boys' bathroom sometime after homeroom, ignored the teenagers passing around joints and bragging about kissing girls beneath the benchers. Got a bus right out of the richer districts, or simply walked.
In his defense – and his victims' – he started by hitting bullies and rescuing people. The victims were always grateful, and so easy to find. Kids several grades younger being shoved around for their lunch money two schools down. The teenage girls being hollered at by boys eyeing them like prizes. The nerds. The gays. The coloured kids. Their attackers posed easy targets, and their victims saw no need to ever report their rescuer.
In fact, Bruce Wayne was almost a hero, rescuing the weak in feats of strength and bravery. He had a reputation, a record. He was whispered about and held in awe, as young childish politics often are at this stage. Even his own school held him in some high accord, though mostly because all these adventures took place off school, and were done before the school day was over.
But for him, the fights were more then just justice, a hobby he had taken up in books and studies, in practice but not in soul. The desire he had starved off for years had weeded itself back into his life as surely as a disease into a host. The urge to do violence, to fight and to challenge, was as strong as his heartbeat. It did not strangle him, as once his wrongness had.
This desire simply dripped, over and over again, wearing him down with quiet resolve. Water torture, except it was all in his head.
His little escapades were not enough. He needed a challenge.
So when the now terrified bullies did not start fights, he found other ones.
He discovered a small back street hidden away, halfway between the rich and the poor, not more then a few blocks away, where boys and girls around his age got together to trade cards and candy, smoke stolen cigarettes with not an inch of finesse and most of all, pick fights.
The second thing that lent so well to this plan was that he had hours each day that he was unaccounted for. The Wayne family had an apartment in the city anyway, and during the school week, that was where he stayed. Away from memories, away from Alfred that couldn't stand to leave him, couldn't stand to look at him. The staff were aware that he came and went, and that was simply what he did.
Bruce was a strategist, he had a mind that knew who to pick and how to win. The backstreet provided an anonymous environment to do so. His victory streak build over time, erasing failures and creating skill. It fed not only the sick feeling inside of him, but it fed his pride, to see his enemies defeated.
He tried not to think about it too much, tried to avoid crossing the worlds with a bit of disguises and good excuses. And he managed it well, for a very long time.
And then he noticed the Other.
. . .
When Bruce was thirteen he was almost unmatched from the group he fought. There was a handful that he never challenged, on the basis that there was some that were too big, too powerful, who fought too dirty. And then there was the Other.
He had noticed early on a thin looking boy, with bruises on his face that never seemed to be from fights and too big clothes. It was almost impossible to tell from looking at him that the Other was different from anyone else there. But Bruce saw his eyes. He saw how he fought and he knew as surely as he had ever known anything, that this boy was smart. He was doing the same things that Bruce was, fighting the same fights and figuring out the same strategies. But unlike some that tried to copy him, the boy was using only his own mind to fuel his goal.
He fought with the same viciousness, planned with the same sharpness and oh, how Bruce's cold heart went aflutter, because so many years he had been alone – surrounded by people, but still terribly alone – and now, this boy.
There was always something different about him. A lick of violence around his mouth, forever wide in haunted laughter. His opponents feared his mocking as much as they feared his bruises.
Bruce was drawn to this boy. It was as if someone had wound a hook around his insides, then trailed all the string across lawns and bridges, down streets and around schools, until the other end had been infused into the Other. The longer he watched the way the Other moved, the stronger he realized this pull was. All his wrongness had been winding him up to the point that he was drawn to a close against this stranger.
Bruce knew. This Other, was the Other, the only Other, the broken, shattered shards of something inside of him that was missing so many pieces but the Other filled them like water between bricks or puzzle pieces into a bigger, better picture.
And the boy knew as well. (Of course he knew, how could he not, he was the Otherotherotherother-) He gave Bruce those same looks, unstitched him bit by bit to find the same things Bruce saw and he loved what he found. Bruce could see it over every inch of his twisted little face.
Sometimes they talked like they were the only people there, but they never used words. Not for a very long time, did they ever speak, only traded words in glances and small hand gestures, each attempt at communicating growing more subtle at each passing week, until the tiniest flicker of their eyes from the other side of the street meant the world.
One Thursday, the boy grinned extra bright, missing canine tooth highlighting his cracked lips. There was a massive bruise across his left eye that almost swelled it shut. It hadn't been there the day before and Bruce had fought until his knuckles had bled, the moon was almost setting. The Other had fought for just as long, and left only a few minutes before Bruce and the bruise hadn't been there when he left. Between the hours of three and six when Bruce had last fought and when he had fought again, it had appeared, along with a slightly split lip and a tired look about the boy.
A new strangeness arose then, one Bruce had not felt before. He wanted to reach out and feel him, hold him and say things he'd have never thought himself saying, because he had seen the way the boy moved, how he talked and he knew how he thought and how he fought. They were the same, like fate had gifted him with a mirror that had birthed a brother he had never had and never would have the chance to have.
It was a gift, a gift from God or some powerful force that had placed upon the earth two such similar people and they aren't even really similar. They are the same, just the same, carved from the same mould and the same material. They just looked different and they led different lives. But it didn't matter because the boy limped when he approached.
That Thursday, the boy came forward – his face painted with false excitement, that dripped away the closer he got, his little shell of protection rotting away, until by the time they were close enough for Bruce to see the smear of blood freckling his lip, there was nothing on the Other's face but blankness, the same bottomless void that was hollowed inside of Bruce.
They stopped only feet from each other, hints of uncertainty nipping at their faces and Bruce can see the same thought he's thinking – that if they get too close, the Other will disappear and they'll find it was all just a sad, sorry illusion of their crumbled minds. So Bruce takes a step (because there is the first obvious difference between them – he's willing to do those sorts of things) and Bruce touches the Other.
The world doesn't end, but they give each other biting smiles. And Bruce understands, that the Other needs his help.
. . .
His name is Jack and he is wonderful.
. . .
About six months after that, they have a routine.
Bruce travels to his school early, where he gets off in town, buys two coffees from an expensive café and leaves one of them on the bus bench, to be picked up from behind when he is joined by Jack, who travels from the narrows on public transit with a bus pass Bruce paid for.
They sit in their graffiti'd alley and pick fights when it suits them, because the space is theirs now, their domain and rule that the others knew, though they did not challenge. It didn't affect their subjects to have champions and thus they do not complain.
They have two hours before Bruce's school starts, so Bruce reads dog-eared novels and memoirs, soaking up knowledge while Jack scratches designs and writes down things he deems absolutely meaningless and irreplaceably important.
They don't really share, but when they do, Bruce says aloud, in a tone barely above a whisper, small bits of information that may be helpful and Jack shows him things drawn in straight lines and straight letters. After they do this, Bruce passes along the books - leaves them on benches and gives them as prizes to their scrapping winners - and Jack destroys everything he makes.
It doesn't matter, if they don't keep it. Between the two of them, they've got the perfect memory. These are things they enjoy discovering about each other - the first time Jack draws a design, shows it, destroys it, and two weeks later, Bruce copies it exactly, down to the pencil scruff marks, they are overjoyed.
It's not always easy, getting their minds to line up just right, but they work at it.
. . .
By the time fourteen unfolds itself, they are growing dependent.
Bruce notices it first, when Jack doesn't show one morning, and why wouldn't he show, and it isn't until some time later that evening, when Bruce hasn't gone to school, and hasn't gone for meals, that the Other pulls down the ladder, and crawls onto the abandoned fire escape they make their perch.
It's raining, and Bruce's jacket is soaked through. He's huddled under the wooden structure they'd put there the summer before, feet frozen where they're pressed against the metal bars. His hands are stiff from digging into his knees, and his neck is sore.
Jack's bleeding, blood matting his bangs. It's almost impossible to see in the fading light, the black hair already dark and wet enough to conceal it, but Bruce feels it, smells it, when the Other buries his head into Bruce's neck.
There's no noises. The usual crowd's abandoned the alleyway for the day. There's just the patter of rain as Jack unzips Bruce's jacket, slides his cold, shaking hands under Bruce's shirt, straddles his lap and stays there.
Bruce digs his fingers into the small of Jack's back, under the cheap windbreaker and sucks in one breath that doesn't shake, doesn't tremble, doesn't threaten to crack, because- because he is strong.
He is strong. He tells himself that, while he envisions a hundred people who could have done this to his Other, and how exactly he'd make every single one of them suffer.
This is the first time something like this happens. It is not the last.
. . .
"This city is like a kingdom." It's late at night. They're fifteen. Jack is sprawled beneath Bruce's sheets, only his eyes and nose, his fingers in front of his face and his toes at the end of the bed are visual. He whispers, but Bruce hears him all the same. "Everyone lives like peasants, waiting for a king or queen to come riding in. They'd hang a man for fun if they could."
Bruce breaths in a lungful of dusted sweat and city that comes off the Other so easily. "Pity," he murmurs in return. "that there isn't an heir."
Bruce can feel the toothful grin, more then see it.
"Says who?" Comes the purr.
And somewhere, the well-laid plans of destiny begin to tick.
. . .
At sixteen, Bruce is sent to a therapist.
"Your caretakers are worried for you, Bruce." She's dressed stiffly, doesn't really meet his eyes. "Dr. Thompkins says you've been displaying alarming behaviour. Mr. Pennyworth is concerned for your health."
"There's nothing wrong with me." Says Bruce, and it feels so strange in his mouth, like he's speaking another language.
The therapist frowns. "You're lying." She says. "What are you really thinking?"
"That you're too late."
He thinks there must have been something about his face, because she seems to believe him. He goes once a week for months, for years.
But nothing comes from it.
. . .
Jack draws the same design every day, and every day he destroys it as easily as can be. He calls it a costume, but that's his way of mocking Bruce.
By seventeen, Bruce's studies have turned to sciences of the chemical and social nature. The patterns that scratch at the boundaries of his mind have begun to formulate into something he can use, and now he sees it everyday; the way people move, the way people talk.
Jack runs his hands over brick and steel.
"Give it time." He says, and burns the sketches.
. . .
They are eighteen when things become dangerous.
There's a call late at night to the manor Bruce mostly resides in. There's only the choking cough of someone's wheezing breath on the other side of the line, and then the strangled sound of "Bruce."
Someone starts making noises that are loud and desperate, and it might have been Bruce, and it might have been Jack, but overall it's almost impossible to tell.
There's a blur, and Bruce finds himself in Gotham General's emergency room, waiting in a limbo that's too slow and too painful to really calm him down.
He doesn't know what's happened.
When they let him in - because he paid the bills and for the private room and all the medical care - Jack's still awake, but lost in his own head, eyes almost black with pain and fear, so much fear.
They both fear, because they are the other to the other and how, how could they possible survive without the other? Would the other wilt, turn to dust if the other died? These are questions they have not asked, have not dared ask, because how could they possibly know the answer.
It's not until Bruce's cards are flagged in the system that Alfred and Leslie come for him. They turn up in the doorway, all frowns and anger and fear and Bruce thinks he'd have been dragged away, if Jack hadn't been holding onto Bruce's arm like the world was dropping away from beneath him.
Jack had turned eighteen two days ago – it had been a grand celebration with forged excuses for school on Bruce's behalf and a hotel room in another part of town and cake and movies and God, it had been fun – and somewhere between then and now, something had changed.
Jack's only words on the subject will always be that he was 'kicked out'. If there was a fight, Bruce doesn't know. If it was family or friends or a youth home or a gang, Bruce doesn't know.
But Leslie Thompkins' eyes soften at the rare look on both of their faces. She touches Alfred's arm gently, gives him a sideways look. They both see what the boys don't want to - that it doesn't look like a stranger laid up in bed. It looks like Bruce was shot too, like two sets of stitches are settling instead of one, like two people came close to dying, instead of one.
"I'm sorry." Bruce wasn't, but he knew people liked hearing these words.
Alfred just titled his head and cast a look upon them, trying to decide how serious they were. He had never met Jack, never known. Suspected, perhaps, that Bruce was hiding something because Bruce was good, but not perfect and he did still get notices from school and sometimes the people who Bruce was suppose to be with made it clear he wasn't.
Bruce simply gave Alfred a long, steady look. "I won't leave him."
Alfred had survived many of Bruce's troubles; all the missed school and the unexplained absences and the dead animals. Leslie had been a friend of the family's long enough to have endured many of them too. They'd had learned not to question – not because they didn't believe they had the right, but because they simply knew it was easier.
Jack gave the two caretakers the most terrified of glances, understanding above all that these were the jailers of his Other and he could take his Bruce away far more easily then Jack could take him back.
"Don't be stupid." Leslie whispers to Bruce, presses a hand to Alfred's arm when he tries to complain.
Alfred signs over a larger amount of money to Bruce's personal accounts, calls his school and gives him the week off and they go, leaving the two boys sitting in a hospital room.
There are some scattered medical reports, at Leslie's request for the first couple of days, then the boys are gone, bills paid, stitches still in, medication abandoned.
Bruce turns up two and a half weeks later, on the door of the manor, dirty and still in the same clothes, but a rare pleased look about him. The money was gone. Jack was gone. Bruce gave the two caretakers a true smile, the first in years.
"You won't find him." He's mine and you can't have him.
They did not speak of Jack.
. . .
By nineteen, they have plans and they have made choices.
Stage one is easiest. Alfred had been dumping college brochures on Bruce's lap for years, and selecting one had been easy. Then it's a simple matter of research-planning-schedules.
Except it isn't.
They have barely been apart since they were so young, and this part of the plan, it calls to go away.
Jack would have surely gone with him, followed him to the ends of the Earth if such a thing was needed, but they had long since decided that Gotham needed them more. If God, or something even greater had placed the two of them so perfectly in this place of broken glass, then it must be destiny that they remain there so. Jack stayed behind; with numbers and addresses for all the places Bruce planned to go.
For Bruce had no plans to stay in college.
For years, they had formulated a plot unlike any other. Because it had started with Bruce's parents in an alleyway and Jack's bruises and it had gone from there to stealing and muggings and so many things they had both indulged and ignored. Their domain, the alley that had started it all, had crumbled years ago, but from it they had watched crime dig into every crack of their city, their glorious kingdom that was slowly rotting. Their world needed something, something beyond after-school programs and rent-a-cops.
They had a scheme. It couldn't even be called a plan. They had a destiny.
Bruce knew where he was going to look, what he was going to do. And he would travel as far as the world went to find every piece of the puzzle, while Jack stayed behind and laid all the groundwork that would mean all the difference to make their plan a success.
There was thousands of lines and hundreds of sketches buried in their heads. More spots then they could count, all hidden throughout the city. Years, they had labored over this, and years more before there would even be a time where they would step forth onto their city, fully prepared for all that was coming.
They had no idea what was before them, or how wrong or far their plan would go.