I OWN NOTHING. EVERYTHING BELONGS TO DC.
Bruce Wayne was Batman.
Jim Gordon had known for years, he knew every member of the Batfamily. Even his own daughter Barbara was a member, though she didn't know that he knew. He wasn't the best detective in the GCPD for nothing. When Jim figured out it was Bruce, his memory had shifted back to when his parents had died, when he was just a little boy shivering in a bloody coat jacket at the prescient. He never knew it back then, but he always had a small feeling in the back of his head that little shivering boy was going to do something great. He thought of how he was the Batman, thought of how he fooled the world with the style and suaveness of his playboy persona as Bruce Wayne. He thought of how he also walked the edge of insanity, well then again anyone who lives in Gotham was entirely sane. You couldn't be sane and live in Gotham, that's just how it was. It was surprising how long he, the Batman had walked that edge and never once tipped over. How he fought every day for a city that owned him nothing, for the city that took his parents, his childhood, away from him. Traumatic experience made him who he is. Traumatic experience shaped his life and who he was going to be ever since that cold dark night.
Batman and Jim had been in this line of work for a very long time, both were stubborn and isolated, bats more than him. They had a type of mutual understanding, one that not many had. They understood each other in a way no one else could, because they had seen horrors beyond their own imaginations. They had been tortured, broken, and beaten by the worst of the worst. And yet, they refused to bow down. When he himself was kidnapped by the Joker and tortured, even after that and everything that happened with Barbara he had refused to kill him. Why? Because they were better, and they refused to kill for the personal morals they had. Even if those villains took everything from them.
Jim smiled. He was always special, sure others had taken up the mantle but they were never him. They did a good job of protecting Gotham from the obvious threats, but they could not anticipate problems before they appeared, like he did. They also never understood Gotham like he did, he wanted to extinguish evil at the center not just at the top. After all one would have to be insane to be the Batman.
He looked at the skyline of Gotham. It's buildings breaking through the high clouds of the dark city. Gotham had always been its own world. It was something else, dangerous, mysterious, unsettling, insane and attaching to the rare chosen. It was a beautiful gothic city and a capital in crime and insanity.
Gotham was truly the city where secrets prosper.
Jim thought of all of this while the bat signal light up Gotham's night. He suddenly appeared behind him, he could feel it the air had changed as if acknowledging his presence. "Jim." He said cold and emotionless. He turned around to look at him, in his black Kevlar armor with the bat symbol on his chest. He studied him for a moment, thinking back to the boy who lost his world in that dark alley. He could have become anything, anything at all with all that money, but he chose to be this dark knight. He chose to fight crime and never kill, no matter what it cost him. That little boy who had all the money in the world grew up to be a man who wanted to cure his city of the crime that ruled it. Wanted to make it into the city his parents always knew it had the potential to be. "Jim?" He asks again. "Oh right, there's been a prison break in Arkham. Joker, Harley, Ivy, and Two-Face broke out. Intel says they're currently in warehouse 32 at the docks." He replied consciously, still lost in his thoughts. He didn't even notice he was gone.
Gone was the boy who lost his parents in that alley, in his place a knight who fights for city.