The system is broken. It's failed us.
I remember being a young girl. When cops were tailing us, watching our home. We slept in stilted, short periods. I slept with a police radio beside my bed, tuned to a channel known to be frequented by corrupt cops. It was them, outside my windows at night. I could see their faces, slightly illuminated by their burning cigarettes as they breathed in the toxins.
Dad would come home with bruises, and he wouldn't tell why. But I knew why. While dad was trying to save the world, his partners were making a fast buck letting criminals slip through the cracks. Terrorists ran Gotham. Our city was a joke to the rest of the world; it was where you went to die, or at best to create a name for yourself as one of them. Villains would come to this city like wannabe actors would go to Los Angeles; most didn't have what it took, but they managed to do damage just the same. Every so often, one would come along that would make it feel like the sky was falling.
Penguin. He was bad.
Black Mask. Schools closed for a few days under his reign of terror.
Harvey Dent. Or Two Face, if you prefer. He was hard to get over. Especially for dad.
It was when these supers started showing up that Batman came through for us. I remember the days when dad and I would fight, scream about Batman: was he a hero, or a criminal? The best of them or the worst of them? It took a long time for my dad to be a believer- but, then again, he always had a lot of reasons not to believe.
The first time I saw him, I knew. I was vulnerable. Alone, in that police station with countless corrupt cops that wanted my dad dead and gone. And he walked in, spoke kindly to me, let me speak to him… he was a good man. I asked him then why he did what he did… why he fought for a Gotham that seemed to want him even less than it wanted decent men like my dad.
"Because I made a promise," he'd said. He didn't say more than that, thanks to the cops that smoke bombed us, but I knew what it meant. It was a promise to all of us, to this city.
I idolized him after that. For years, my dad and I had the same arguments over and over again. It wasn't until Batman saved his life personally that he started to hear me. And it wasn't until the masquerade ball that Batman saw he could trust me, the way I trusted him.
"Does it have to be that mask?" Dad asked me as I closed the door to my room, my costume extra warm in our small apartment.
"It's too late to find anything new now," I shrugged.
"You know, I'm the one who gets to catch hell for that," he groaned, finishing off one of his stinky, cheap cigars.
"Well then, I guess you should be glad I'm bringing work," I said, slinging my backpack with my laptop and gear over my shoulder. "I'll find some corner of the place and work. You don't need to be embarrassed."
"It's not…" he stammered, "it's just that, as commissioner, I can't be seen to support him. That's the job."
"Well, you're not wearing the bat-suit," I smiled, "I am. Besides, it's so cheap and homemade, no one will take it seriously."
We left in a car that the Wayne foundation had sent to pick us up. It was a gala, meant to celebrate all the successes my dad had achieved over the course of the year. They were successes that were all, at least in part, owed to Batman. But no one would admit that. It was too easy to pretend he was a villain, too.
I did the obligatory smiles and handshakes. The kind waves. It was when the kindly old butler, Alfred, approached my father to ask if he needed anything that I slipped away, slinking off into a quiet corridor of the elegant mansion to find somewhere to work.
I had retreated quite a ways into the mansion before the roar of the party had faded to a dull murmur. I opened my laptop and got to work on trying to figure out the Wayne wifi password.
He had a guest network, but no way was I working on that. I wasn't planning on doing anything too heavy tonight, but I did want to continue my research on the recent appearances of a new masked vigilante in Bludhaven. He was spry and acrobatic, and I'd noticed too easily that this new guy had emerged just as Robin stopped appearing alongside Batman. I wondered if Batman was training people to fight his good fight in other neighborhoods. Could this new guy be Robin, just moving on to the next job? If so, he must have left a trail, right? A recent move to Bludhaven, probably a new employee in a security firm or law firm or maybe the police department?
Admittedly, my fascination was fueled partially by my crush on the boy-wonder. It was a stupid, embarrassing crush; comparable to having a crush on a Jonas brother. But I always got giddy and excited when I saw his image flash across a screen.
The wifi was not going to be hacked easily. As I dug into the system protecting the Wayne mansion, I slowed my roll. Sure, I would be able to decrypt everything between here and there, but why the hell did this rich boy have 15 layers of encrypted walls between me and it? What was he so intent on protecting? As I punched through the barriers, it all became clear…
Frequent searches in criminal databases, from GCPD all the way to FBI and CIA, populated the network history. Without much prodding, I found schematics for a car with a booster on it akin to one you could find on a rocket. There were floor plans to almost every municipal and private corporation zoned within Gotham city, including major banks, hospitals, and GCPD headquarters. But the schematics I found for a "bat cave" were most impressive, with access codes and entry points- one of which should have been in the room with me, if I was reading the maps right. I punched in a code to the access point and a cool burst of air shot at me as a door disguised as a bookcase opened.
I quickly put my backpack on and carried the laptop with me as I approached the bookcase. Could this really be happening? Was Bruce Wayne, the erratic, famous bachelor, notorious playboy really the Batman?
The corridor was dark, even with my laptop lighting the way. But I stepped inside and closed the bookcase behind me. Bright lights shot up around me, leading me to a small enclosure. I stepped inside and a gate closed behind me automatically. It was an elevator, and it dropped me down several stories very quickly; so fast, that my hair blew up behind me and the fake cape I wore caught the breeze and whipped up beneath my backpack.
When the elevator came to a stop, I stepped out slowly into the cavern as lights sprang on. A giant computer set up was to my right, with 6 giant screens and a dashboard control panel that wrapped around a comfortable chair. It was a dream. Beside it, the legendary Bat Mobile sat poised for launch in front of a road leading out of a dark tunnel through the caves. The Bat Wing hung in a corner of the cave, and I couldn't help but notice the hundreds of live bats hanging in the cave. I worked through Wayne's network to disable the alarms and sensors he had in place, then moved closer to the giant computer display. I tapped the space bar and the screens sprang into lively color. News monitors played on most of the screens, though I couldn't help but notice a facial analysis running on The Joker from one of his terrorizing videos he'd released last year. Footage of the new Bludhaven vigilante, aptly named 'Nightwing,' was running on one of the monitors. I smiled; it confirmed that I was right. Whoever this Nightwing was seemed of serious interest to Batman. To Bruce Wayne.
"You know," I heard behind me. I jumped and turned around to see Bruce Wayne, wearing a debonair suit, standing directly behind me. But he wasn't wearing his playful smile you always saw in the interviews with Vicki Vale, nor did he have that kind smile he wore at charity rallies. In this moment, he seemed every inch of the terrifying Batman that criminals of our city cowered before. "The party was meant to be upstairs."
"I'm sorry," I stammered, not knowing what else to say. "I… shouldn't have come down here, I know…"
"How did you get down here?" he asked. I noticed he was speaking in his own voice, not the growling, gravely tone he spoke in while in his suit. It wasn't the voice he'd spoken to me in years ago, when I was just a girl in the GCPD server room.
"I bypassed your encrypted walls… found your schematics… your access and security codes," I explained honestly. He nodded and stepped past me, reaching the monitors and darkening some of their screens.
"You've learned a lot," he nodded, "since the last time I saw you." I smiled. He remembered me. "I'm impressed."
"Then let me help you," I boldly suggested after mustering the courage. He looked back down at me, and I couldn't tell if he was surprised or simply satisfied. "I can make your systems stronger. Better. And I have training, I can fight." He seemed to hesitate at the final phrase. "I want to fight."
"You shouldn't fight because you want to," he said, looking up at the screens again. "We fight because we have to."
"And someone has to, right?" I asked. "Besides," I turned to the side, following his gaze up to the screen with Nightwing and daring to take a guess, "you just lost a partner, didn't you?" He stared back at me a long moment, studying me and reading me, before he smiled.