Chapter 4: The Two Lives of Mr. Wayne
When Bruce returned to the mansion that evening, he found Alfred dusting a valuable Ming Dynasty vase in the main hall while three of his hired housekeepers were setting up the trimmings and the buffet table for the expo the next evening. Bruce went to the kitchen where he had a much cheaper television set to tune in to the local news. As he expected, the news concerning crime in Gotham City was not pleasant.
"The tally of mob incidents has risen to higher levels in Gotham City this past month," said the anchorman. "With Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Maroni at each other's throats for control of Gotham's criminal underworld, the city's police force is stretched thin and little progress has been made to end the gang war. Commissioner Gilian Loeb was unavailable for comment. However, police Captain James W. Gordon has made a statement that has authorities concerned. The possibility of Commissioner Loeb having ties to the mob has once again sprung up, though Loeb has denied all allegations and has threatened Gordon with libel charges…"
Bruce turned off the television and returned to the main hall with a very suspicious look. He said to Alfred, "I think when this expo of Wayne Enterprises' latest project is done, it'll be time to begin the promise I made to liberate Gotham's citizens from the crime that's been allowed to run rampant in this city."
Alfred looked up from the vase and said, "I should think that the mayor would be able to put Mr. Loeb in his place."
"Mayor Hill is only in his first term in office and already he's being mired by accusations of corruption," Bruce sighed with disappointment. "And if Loeb is connected to the mob, he's probably been threatening the mayor with retaliation if he chooses to crack down on either side."
Alfred gave a nod of lamenting disappointment and then asked in a brighter tone, "Aside from the troubles in Gotham, how was your dinner interview with the lovely Vicki Vale, whom you haven't seen since your high school days?"
"To be honest, she's made me happier than I've been in a long time," replied Bruce with a loving smile. "I invited her to the expo here tomorrow night."
Alfred gave his former ward a smile and said, "Your mother and father would be proud of how far you've come, Master Bruce. You've begun to rebuild your life and Gotham along with it."
"I can only hope that the steps I take will be enough," said Bruce. "And if they aren't, I'll find out why and improve. But for now, I have an expo to organize and a date to think about."
...
The evening of the Wayne Enterprises microbiology expo was one of the most pleasant evenings Bruce had known since his parents had been alive. He was there to greet his guests in the main hall, dressed in his father's business attire with his dark hair combed back and his face alight with a smile. He welcomed Lucius Fox, his top medical aide Leslie Thompkins, his old friend and attorney Harvey Dent, police captain Jim Gordon and his little daughter Barbara, and several of Gotham's upper-class citizens who had been friends of the Wayne family for years.
Then came the guest of the hour, Vicki Vale. She was dressed in a mauve ball gown and had her red hair drawn up in a French braided bun. She looked positively stunning, and Bruce couldn't take his eyes off her lovely face as he approached her and gave a bow, saying, "Good evening, Vicki."
"Good evening, Bruce," responded Vicki.
She took his arm and walked with him to the main room where the event was being held and there, Bruce showed her a curious set of medical boosters that Leslie had brought from the medical science wing of Wayne Enterprises. Intrigued, Vicki asked, "So what is the subject of this expo, Bruce? Have you finally discovered a cure for cancer?"
"Not quite," replied Bruce with a grin. "It's a cure for hantavirus. My father was working on numerous cures for humanity's most dreaded diseases for years, and this one is the most efficient variant to date for enabling the body to combat the hantavirus disease and overcome it with a simple inoculation."
Vicki was amazed by this and said, "Let's hope that your hard work pays off, Bruce. One less disease means one healthier city."
Bruce and Vicki then strolled for a while before one of Bruce's waiters, a young man with sandy hair, approached with a cheese and meat platter. "Hor d'oeuvres?"
Bruce offered a steak tartare to Vicki, who tasted it and swallowed with a bit of discomfort. She said politely, "A good dish, but I prefer my meat cooked."
"No worries, Vicki," smiled Bruce. "I know the perfect remedy."
A waitress approached with a platter of garlic shrimp, which Bruce and Vicki both enjoyed together over a glass of champagne. Caviar was served next and then chocolate gateau was served for the dessert course. When the event was done, Bruce had Leslie Thompkins bring the hantavirus vaccines with her to her medical office and then wished a good night to his other guests. Vicki stayed behind, and not merely to ask more questions about his vaccine project. She wanted to be the last to leave simply to spend the remainder of the evening with Bruce. As if reading her mind, Bruce saved a dance especially for her, and he and Vicki danced under the light of the chandelier long after the evening sky had become sparsely spangled with stars.
...
Bruce had enjoyed his first six months home in Gotham City, but with crime still on the rise, he soon felt that it was time to use the training he had learned to take on the hardships that paid law enforcers just could not do by themselves. Regrettably, he learned the hard way that his methods were lacking in more than he knew.
The first time he sought to stand up to crime was Saturday the thirteenth. He was not willing to go after the mob until he had given the lawbreakers of Gotham a concrete reason to fear him, so he would have to start small. He chased down a few muggers in the downtown area, attempted to foil an attack on City Hall by armed robbers, and even attacked a few gangsters making a hideout near Crime Alley, where his mother and father had been murdered several years before. And in his attempt, he found that the criminals he met only threatened him, fought back, or shot at him. They were not afraid.
"What am I doing wrong?' Bruce asked himself two weeks later. "There has to be a way to let them know that their get-away-with-it mindsets don't work!"
"Perhaps, Master Bruce, you should try getting into their heads before you set your fists to their jawlines," Alfred suggested.
Bruce took this idea to heart and began developing everything he could think of that might make criminals in Gotham City know to fear him. He built fighting sticks, grappling hooks, and smoke bombs as well as a large tri-screen computer worth $50,000 in the attic laboratory. He continued to train in all the fighting arts he had mastered and kept himself as fit as possible. Then in the first week of April, Bruce set out to face down criminals again in the heart of Gotham City, but still, nothing he did was enough to make even a street thug cry out and drop to his knees. In just a few weeks, Leslie had lost track of the amount of times that Bruce had nearly been shot or run down by an oncoming truck in traffic thanks to chasing criminals in the streets who were not afraid to fire with reckless abandon.
By April, Bruce was nearly at his wit's end. He had tried ski masks and dark garments to surprise muggers and burglars on the streets and even with his superior fighting skills and the devices he had at his disposal, it was not enough. And for the first time in his life, Bruce did not know how he could fix this difficult situation.
Monday, April 5th saw a thunderstorm pass through Gotham City. While the rest of the staff at Wayne Manor was on their breaks before finishing the nightly cleanup, Bruce was in his father's study looking over public files of the most dangerous criminals in Gotham which he had found at the hall of records the previous week. Each file contained enough information to have these lawbreakers in court and sentenced, but he could see that the work these felons did was the sort where an attacker in a ski mask would be as commonplace as a change in the weather.
"Criminals are cowards in the face of the law," Bruce muttered to himself. "If they know that I'm strong enough to bring them down, why don't they fear me putting the seal on their shame?!"
He paused and looked at the picture on his desk of his mother and father. Bruce Wayne felt the old wound in his soul ache and he said sadly, "I'm sorry, Mother, Father. I don't know what else to do. I promised that I would fight Gotham's crime so no one else would suffer the way I did when I lost you that night, and no criminal I fight shows any fear. I can sense they're afraid of being accountable for what they do, but the way they rush into breaking the law makes them too bold to feel it. I need help."
Bruce sat there in silence, hanging his head in disappointment and sitting quietly in his chair before he looked through the window. The storm was letting up, and the pale moon seemed to stare through the clouds like a great silver eye. Bruce was so deep in thought that he did not notice much more than the moon and clouds outside the window when suddenly…
A clinking, shattering sound of breaking glass made Bruce jump as if he had been shot, but what he saw next made him cry out in fear for the first time since he witnessed the murder of his mother and father. A dark brown bat flew at his face, barely visible in the darkness of the room. But in the dimness of the moonlight, Bruce could see the bat's face fairly well, with its fangs bared as if to strike and its dark, expressionless eyes staring at him as it came.
Bruce watched in utter shock as the bat came, but to his surprise, it seemed to fall away from his line of vision. He watched as the bat flapped its pointed wings but saw that it was not swooping up into the air to take flight again. Instead, it fell to the floor and lay there twitching in pain.
Bruce only sat there, silently looking at the creature that had frightened him so dreadfully, and the longer he looked, the more he realized how much power such a small creature had to frighten humans: the misunderstanding about bats and their nature, the vampire myths told throughout history, and the natural inclination of people to fear darkness. He barely registered Alfred rushing into the room and saying, "I shall place that creature safely out of doors again, sir."
Bruce looked at his butler and said with a new determination in his voice, "I've found what I need, Alfred."
In the following weeks, Bruce set to work on what would be his most ambitious project outside of his philanthropy. His first task was to have a headquarters and a place of sanctuary, and he found one directly under Wayne Manor. The location of his choosing was a subterranean cave that had been a Union stronghold in the Civil War and had been hidden from Gotham's people for years after. To access the cave from inside the mansion, Bruce paid a construction fee to have a staircase built into the walls of his mansion and lead into the cave. After this, he had a high-tech elevator constructed and then had the enormous lab computer in the attic disassembled and then reassembled in the cave after the new catwalks and platforms were built in.
The next time Bruce went to the old grandfather clock in the library, he signaled Alfred to follow him. As he turned the clock's hands to forty-eight minutes after ten, the clock slid aside and revealed the secret passage to the underground maze of caves under Wayne Manor. Once he followed Bruce inside, Alfred got a very great surprise.
Bruce had set up a forensic laboratory in the cave along with some spare equipment from Wayne Enterprises that would work in the fields of microbiology, mechanics, biochemistry, geochemistry, and botany. On several other tables were arrangements of the strangest of devices: metallic boomerangs and shurikens that resembled bats with their wings spread wide, two cable releasers with the same bat motif, tracking devices, smoke and flame grenades, flame-retardant grenades, and more. The enormous computer that was in the attic was positioned against a back wall along with equipment that could calculate and analyze with the touch of a button.
"My word, Master Bruce," said Alfred with a hint of amusement. "I knew you were dedicating your spare time to protecting Gotham from crime, but doing it from here in these caves?"
"These caves will serve as my laboratory for doing the work behind fighting crime when the public is not seeing me at my philanthropy," replied Bruce as he walked into a shadowy alcove. Alfred could not see what he was doing, but he heard his master speak. "However, I've chosen it for more than practicality. If I am going to tear every crime empire down in Gotham and give its citizens some measure of hope, I must do it in a way that makes them fear me. I must use their wild superstitions against them, give them something that teaches them the fear that they give people with every broken law."
When he saw Bruce step out from those shadows, Alfred felt his heart skip a beat in utter fright. Bruce's face was masked by a black cowl with pointed ears, and his eyes were hidden behind white lenses in the mask, yet Bruce could see with them on as if it were daytime. He was clad in a gray combat suit sporting a black bat symbol on the chest. He also wore black gloves and boots, a brass-colored belt equipped with several of the devices he had built adorned his waist, and extending from the neck of his cowl was a long, black cape that was designed like the wings of a bat. For all intents and purposes, Bruce Wayne was gone. In his place was a creature of the night thirsting to end the reign of crime of Gotham once and for all.
A/N: I hope the night Batman was born was good for you, my readers. Next chapter: it begins! The Batman strikes!
