Hush's Last Stand
Too Many Funerals
Gotham had too many funerals. Simple supply and demand made them expensive. The Fox family insisted on a closed casket. Bruce Wayne attended incognito. The weeping masses brought him back to his first funeral. He didn't cry then. Leslie Thompkins told him he could if he felt like it. He hadn't felt like it. He hadn't felt like anything.
He loved his parents with all his heart and someone ripped that all away. He never shed a tear. He let himself drift away into the gray comforts of catatonia. Only the combined efforts of Leslie Thompkins and Alfred Pennyworth rescued Bruce from his own heartbreak. To this day, partial catatonia hampered his ability to express sadness.
Everything had gone wrong. Someone had framed him for the murder of Joe Chill, the man he had spent over half his life looking for. Police found a shotgun belonging to Alfred Pennyworth at the scene of the crime. Bruce Wayne knew that he had made a mistake when he chose not to report the stolen Greener. He just had no idea how severe the consequences could get. The cops had more than the murder weapon. They had a video feed placing Bruce Wayne in Joe Chill's holding cell at the time of the murder.
Dick Grayson made the ultimate sacrifice. Disguised as Bruce Wayne right down to the fingerprint gloves and leg extensions, Nightwing let the police bring him in. He had summoned Dick in the belief that the Wayne Manor would have to weather another attack. He had no idea that the police would come looking for Bruce Wayne.
Alfred made sure to protect Tim from Child Protective Services and their army of lawyers. Child Protective Services had a long-standing grudge with the Wayne Estate ever since Alfred and Leslie's legal acrobatics allowed them to raise Bruce as their own. What they did bordered on the illegal. God only knew why they let him adopt not one but three children.
In addition to his regular work as a butler, Alfred served as a one-man disinformation service. When the police threatened Wayne Manor with a search warrant, he saw to dismantling every entrance to the Batcave. The cops would need seismic radar to detect its presence now. Thankfully, Batman had liberated the Batmobile before Alfred saw to this task.
While not as big a gearhead as he led the public to believe, anyone with an understanding of physics could appreciate the Batmobile. It all the advantages of a tank and a race car one could fit into a single vehicle. It cost a lot of money to build even for Bruce Wayne. Fitted with state-of-the-art ballistics protection, even the President of the United States didn't ride around this safe. Only now that circumstances forced him to live out of the Batmobile did he truly appreciate this modern miracle of automotive technology.
Batman would have had the perfect alibi. With Bruce Wayne in custody, he could have operated at all hours of the day with impunity. Still, Dick's loyalty surprised him. After all the disagreements and the fights, Dick hadn't hesitated to take the fall for him. The police wanted him to take a polygraph test, but what would he say when they asked for his name. He needed to stall for time until Batman could prove his theory.
The video feed had caught someone who looked like Bruce Wayne in the act of killing Joe Chill. The Bruce Wayne doppelganger had the shotgun the Joker had stolen from the manor. And Scarecrow's feeble efforts with Bane lacked the follow-through of a genuine attempt on his life. The last time his enemies moved like pawns on a chess board, the trail led to Thomas Elliot, childhood friend and closeted sociopath, last seen in the Gotham River.
Hush, as his co-conspirators called him, did something that unnerved Bruce Wayne. Not only did he know his secret identity, not only did he know how to manipulate psychos to do his bidding, he knew how to stay out of the picture until the moment he had Batman and Bruce Wayne exactly where he wanted them.
Worse yet, Harvey Dent had gone missing. Before his transformation into Two-Face, he had served as District Attorney of Gotham. After his corrective surgery, the staff of Arkham Asylum deemed him rehabilitated. Mayor Hamilton Hill pulled a few strings to get his old job back as a show of good faith. His involvement in Hush's initial downfall and his own fractured psyche made him a vulnerable target to this growing conspiracy.
Victor Fries, a cryogenics expert, had turned cold-blooded criminal for one reason and one reason only. Hush needed only play the Nora card to manipulate Mr. Freeze into kidnapping Bruce Wayne from police custody. It served to further aggravate public opinion against Bruce Wayne. Wayne Enterprises took the worst dip in stock value since the Great Depression. Several cops present lost fingers and toes to frostbite. Detective Crispin Allen lost an entire arm when he tried to stop Mr. Freeze by firing a shot through his containment suit.
Firefly had set fire to several buildings on Crime Alley to distract Batman. Like an amateur, he took the bait. Hush knew how to push Bruce's buttons. Loosing an arsonist on such a familiar and painful location guaranteed his immediate arrival. It also fitted a bizarre thematic harmony. Hush had used fire to distract Batman from ice.
Bruce Wayne would never forget that fateful press conference held afterwards. Commissioner Gordon condemned Bruce Wayne's apparent collusion with Mr. Freeze. "From this moment on, the Gotham City Police Department has declared war on Batman. We want to send a message. We will not tolerate vigilante justice in our city. Period. If he can hear me, I hope he will surrender now. We have offered a million dollars in cash to anyone who could bring down the Bat." An ironic final note for a man who just spoke out against vigilante justice.
Bruce Wayne took an awful risk coming to the funeral, but he didn't expect to find Thomas Elliot in attendance. The red-haired man in the generic trenchcoat he once called friend smirked. "Wearing your Matches Malone disguise to a funeral." He playfully paced around him. "Have you no respect for the dead?"
Bruce Wayne's eyes narrowed. "What would stop me from taking you out, right here, right now?" Hush had led the Joker to Lucius Fox. He knew it. He could pretty much smell the guilt festering on him like maggots on a corpse. What he would have given to have the permission of his parents to break every bone in his neck.
Thomas Elliot shrugged. "I don't know. The police might want to see that." Hush gestured to the cops. As a close friend of Bruce Wayne, the police anticipated Bruce Wayne making an appearance at the funeral. With Bruce Wayne a fugitive and Dick Grayson a prisoner of Mr. Freeze, he had no choice but to let him go.
At the same time, a legally dead Thomas Elliot couldn't hurt him either. Thomas eyed the impatience in Bruce's eyes. "Nothing in nature happens uselessly, Bruce. You'll get your chance. When you decide to give up your self-righteous mission, I'll introduce you to my wife. You might know her."
The comment about a spouse perplexed Bruce. Thomas Elliot did not seem like the marrying type. Still, some guys had better luck in romance than others. The Joker and Batman had one thing in common, a healthy fear of commitment. The Joker had fired Harley Quinn out of cannon. As for Bruce, he might as well have fired Selina Kyle out of cannon because he would never see her again. Though reports circulated of a female cat burglar in the south of France, he could only hope that Catwoman had not returned to her thieving ways.
Leaving more questions than answers, Thomas Elliot stopped at the graves of Bruce's parents with jealousy in his eyes. In a sick twisted way, Thomas Elliot envied Bruce's tragedy. He would have inherited a fortune if Thomas Wayne had not saved Tommy's mother from that "car accident" that killed his father. Even as Batman, he had met only a few deprived enough to do what he did. Imagine his shock when he realized he made friends with one.